The Unix Workbench

The Unix Workbench

Finally a free, open source book designed to teach Unix to anybody! Unix is over 40 years old yet it's still used to power your phone, the internet, and the latest scientific research. If you know how to use a mouse and keyboard then this book can provide you with the foundation you need to start coding - no previous experience expected!

About the Book

Learning the command line can be a difficult and intimidating task, but this book is designed to be your lighthouse in the modern computational storm. Unix is a 40 year old operating system that powers the internet, your phone, and the latest scientific research. This book aims to be a gateway to the world of computer programming, providing you with a set of tools that will allow you to scale your ideas. Even if you have no prior programming experience The Unix Workbench can help you build a solid foundation which you can use to build the next great business, discover a new innovation, or choreograph a ovation-inducing ballet.

This book begins by helping you get access to Unix, followed by an introduction to how you can use the command line to navigate your computer just like you normally would with your mouse and keyboard. We will then discuss more advanced topics including how to do complex searches with regular expressions, how to configure your programming environment, and how to connect multiple programs together. We'll continue with an introduction to programming in the Bash language so you can write your own programs for Unix. Finally we'll discuss how you can share your code with Git and GitHub, and we'll explore how you can set up your own cloud computer for free.

This book also serves as an educational experiment. By reading this book you will learn how you can edit this book using the Unix tools that we'll discuss. If you think this book can be improved in any way, instructions for making changes and suggestions are included.

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About the Author

Sean Kross is a software developer in the department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sean's professional interests range between metagenomics, cybersecurity, and human-computer interaction. He is also the lead developer of the swirl, a software package designed to teach programming, statistics, and data science in an authentic programming environment. You can find Sean on Twitter and GitHub at @seankross.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

What is Unix?

Getting Unix

Mac & Ubuntu Users

Windows

Command Line Basics

Hello Terminal!

Navigating the Command Line

Creation and Inspection

Migration and Destruction

Working with Unix

Self-Help

Get Wild

Search

Configure

Differentiate

Pipes

Make

Bash Programming

Math

Variables

User Input

Logic and If/Else

Arrays

Braces

Loops

Functions

Writing Programs

Git and GitHub

What are Git and GitHub?

Setting Up Git and GitHub

Getting Started with Git

Important Git Features

Branching

GitHub

Nephology

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Setting Up DigitalOcean

Connecting to the Cloud

Cloud Computing Basics

Shutting Down a Server

Start Building

Next Steps

Giving Feedback

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